That's made of awesome!
I talked to some other devs I know about the problem, and they were suggesting that we might not be giving a consistent enough load to the GPU thanks to some batching that we're doing. So what I'm going to do is make it so that the game writes a few bits of useless stuff offscreen using unity's normal rendering pipeline. That will keep the GPU constantly in at least mild use, which might fix the issue. I also plan on making a settings option so that you can crank up the amount of useless stuff it draws in that manner, so that you can experiment with it on your machine if need be (since I am unable to do so directly).
My hope is that by just writing a little bit of stuff on a more continuous basis, that the game engine will trick the graphics card drivers into behaving without actually your having to turn anything up more heavily. Because if you weren't running two youtube videos in the background, you could definitely get even better performance out of the game -- that's the real gut-punch there. By running those videos you're getting better performance than you were, sure -- and by a large margin, too -- but it's still then making the game fight those videos for the hardware and that's lowering the framerate you really should be getting from the game. There has to be a better way.
One of the devs also suggested that there might be some settings in the Catalyst Control Center that might better let you tune this anyhow. But ideally this would work without that sort of tuning because even if you tune it and fix it for yourself, other people are still going to think the framerate in our game strangely stinks if they have your hardware.
Anyway, I'll look into that stuff after we're finished on our memory leak hunt.
